I was faced with this decision just about a month ago. What I wanted was 
to learn a scripting language better than ksh and Tcl.

The choice between Python and Ruby was about aesthetic hair-splitting, 
and for my taste, Ruby wins in this department.

Nathaniel Talbott wrote:
 > On Apr 2, 2004, at 08:19, Ville Vainio wrote:
 > Hmmm... you're missing the two things that completely turned me off of
 > Python (and eventually led me to Ruby): gratuitous use of underscores
 > and passing self everywhere.

I didn't like both of these things, too - but not strongly enough to 
turn to Ruby. I have made my choice after reading about Python lambdas. 
Lambda in Python is a single expression, and the standard way to 
overcome this fact involves creative use of logical operator precedence.

By the way, I don't know if it's right or not, but were I looking for an 
application programming language, rather than scripting (e.g., to get 
away from Java), I would choose Python. It has a more mature appearance.

Not that I am expecting to get away from Java in this area any time soon 
- in the "army of junior coders" business model, static type-checking is 
vital :)

Brgds,
Alex